I have said that the last scene of Othello, though terribly painful, contains almost nothing to diminish the admiration and love which heighten our pity for the hero (p. 198). I said 'almost' in view of the following passage (V. ii. 123 ff.):
Emil. O, who hath done this deed?
Des. Nobody; I myself. Farewell: Commend me to my kind lord: O, farewell! [Dies.
Oth. Why, how should she be murdered?[267]
Emil. Alas, who knows?
Oth. You heard her say herself, it was not I.
Emil. She said so: I must needs report the truth.
Oth. She's, like a liar, gone to burning hell: 'Twas I that kill'd her.
Emil. O, the more angel she,
And you the blacker devil!
Oth. She turn'd to folly, and she was a whore.
This is a strange passage. What did Shakespeare mean us to feel? One is astonished that Othello should not be startled, nay thunder-struck, when he hears such dying words coming from the lips of an obdurate adulteress. One is shocked by the moral blindness or obliquity which takes them only as a further sign of her worthlessness. Here alone, I think, in the scene sympathy with Othello quite disappears. Did Shakespeare mean us to feel thus, and to realise how completely confused and perverted Othello's mind has become? I suppose so: and yet Othello's words continue to strike me as very strange, and also as not like Othello,--especially as at this point he was not in anger, much less enraged. It has sometimes occurred to me that there is a touch of personal animus in the passage. One remembers the place in Hamlet (written but a little while before) where Hamlet thinks he is unwilling to kill the King at his prayers, for fear they may take him to heaven; and one remembers Shakespeare's irony, how he shows that those prayers do not go to heaven, and that the soul of this praying murderer is at that moment as murderous as ever (see p. 171), just as here the soul of the lying Desdemona is angelic in its lie. Is it conceivable that in both passages he was intentionally striking at conventional 'religious' ideas; and, in particular, that the belief that a man's everlasting fate is decided by the occupation of his last moment excited in him indignation as well as contempt? I admit that this fancy seems un-Shakespearean, and yet it comes back on me whenever I read this passage. [The words 'I suppose so' (l. 3 above) gave my conclusion; but I wish to withdraw the whole Note]